I am getting a slew of errors when I attempt to run a cron job following my hosting company's instructions. From researching the errors, I suspect the instructions are wrong. But their support is telling me this is a development issue and they can't help me. So I hope someone here can tell me the correct way to run cron in this environment.
The site is running without error. Cron runs successfully by using "admin/reports/status/run-cron" or by using the URL provided for running cron from outside the site.
The instructions say to use the following command:
cd /home/username/public_html && php /home/username/public_html/cron.php >/dev/null 2>&1
This fails silently, meaning that nothing happens that I can see, but the status report does not indicate that cron has run. So I removed the ">/dev/null ..." part in order to allow the system to send me a result e-mail. Thus the command I'm using now is:
cd /home/username/public_html && php /home/username/public_html/cron.php
When this command executes, I get an e-mail with hundreds of errors, mostly like:
Notice: Undefined index: argc in /home/username/public_html/includes/bootstrap.inc on line 3407
Notice: Undefined index: SCRIPT_NAME in /home/username/public_html/includes/bootstrap.inc on line 1622
I found a forum post about the same kind of problem, and the offered solution was to "Use a URL to cron.php with wget or curl." Unfortunately, my Unix is rusty and I don't know how to do that.
Can someone suggest how to modify the command in the host instructions so that cron will run correctly?
Thanks for your help.